In fact, it is the doings of these two pairs of precious feet, with the bodies, heads, and arms that belong to them, that have caused the dust to gather in my desk, and the "Garden Boke," though not the garden, which is more of a joy than ever, to be suspended and take a different form. Flesh-and-blood books that write themselves are so compelling and absorbing that one often wonders at the existence of any other kind, and, feeling this strongly, yet I turn to paper pages as silent confidants. Why? Heredity and its understudy, Habit, the two _h_'s that control both the making of solitary tartlets as well as family pies. So the last entry in the "Garden Boke" was made a week before the day recorded in the white book with the cherubs' heads painted on it that underlies the shoes. It seems both strange and significant to me now that this book chanced to be given me by Lavinia Dorman, mother's school friend and bridesmaid, a spinster of fifty-five, and was really the beginning of the transfer of her friendship to me, the only woman friendship that I have ever had, and its quality has that fragrant pungence that comes from sweet herbs, that of all garden odours are the most lasting. I suppose that it is one of the strongest human habits to write down the very things that one is least likely to forget, and _vice-versa;_ for certainly I shall never forget the date and double record on that first fair page beneath the illuminated word _Born_,--yet I often steal up here to peep at it,--and live the intervening five years backward for pure joy. January 10, 189-, Richard Russell------ and John Evan------. Every time I read the names anew I wonder what I should have done if there had been a single name upon the page. I must then have chosen between naming him for father _or_ Evan--an impossibility; for even if the names had been combined, whose should I have put first? No, the twins are in every way an advantage. To Evan, in providing him at once with a commuted family sufficient for his means; to father, among other reasons, by giving him the pleasure of saying, to friends who felt it necessary to visit him in the privacy of his study and be apologetically sympathetic, "I have observed that the first editions of very important books are frequently in two volumes," sending them away wondering what he really meant; to me by saving the rack of argument, the form of evil I most detest, and to their own chubby selves no less, in that neither one has been handicapped for a single day by the disadvantage of being an only child!